Joyce Carol Oates

Paper Summary:

In this article, the writer describes how the American fiction writer Joyce Carol Oates has not simply tackled issues of national importance in her novels. She also has a substantial critical body of literary essays and works of nonfiction. The writer discusses that over the course of her career, as Oates' has grown more prolific as a writer of fiction, Oates' nonfiction essays and writing have had an increasingly literary rather than a journalistic quality in the tone of Oates' prose, even while their subject matter has tackled issues of national importance. Referring to examples of Oates' literary works, the writer examines the author's concerns and style of writing.

From the Paper:

"The review of McCarthy precedes a flight of philosophical fancy, as Oates muses not simply about this novel, but about the style of the author and why his work compels her, and compels other readers, time and time again, despite the violent nature of McCarthy's prose. "No one would mistake Cormac McCarthy's worlds as "real" except in the way that fever dreams are 'real,' a heightened and distilled gloss upon the human condition." (Oates, 2005) Oates shows evident familiarity with the entire span of McCarthy's works, and the reader might have difficulty fully comprehending the review, had the reader not read Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses, books that Oates has read and refers to as common knowledge in her analysis of how the masculine and bloody world of the author she is reviewing speaks to the extreme nature of the human life, not just in the Wild Wild West McCarthy chronicles, but in modern times. Her essay on Lear, in contrast, wrestles more with what Shakespearean critics such as Norman Lear have written about the Bard's use of narrative structure."

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